Description:Beyond Negotiation is a fast-paced action shooter with lots of enemies and missions to engage. Blast your way through an army of invading aliens and upgrade your ship in order to withstand the hordes of enemies.

It is somewhat completed, playable atleast, but i'm still open to suggestions and improvements.All ideas, comments, complaints, request are very welcome. I don't get offended if you have a lot of critisism :-)

The game displays "Stage 1" and "Stage Won!" immediately as play begins and then there is a pause before "Wave 1" briefly appears and then the first select upgrade dialogue is displayed. No icons appear in the boxes for the different upgrades, but I presume that isn't implemented yet.

I found it initially confusing that the enemies were same colour as my ship and I would pick a different colour for at least the first enemies introduced to the player. Also, the arrows surrounding you too closely resemble ships themselves. My first thought was to attack them and I did not realise what they meant until I had played a couple of times. It might be worth trying it with arrows on the borders of the window instead. On subsequent stages, the game will offer you upgrades you've already taken. It's not clear if picking the same one again is intended to provide cumulative enhancement. After stage 4 the game wraps around to the beginning.

If your mouse leaves the window when a key is pressed down and if the key is released while the mouse is outside the window then it will be logically stuck down when the game is unpaused.

@komadori: Glad to hear it works on your system aswell. I'll edit the first post to reflect this :-)It seems i forgot to remove a single line of code making it skip stage 1, which i used for testing. I should have checked that out before i uploaded it to the webpage. It should be fixed now though. Thinks for noticing :-)A lot of people seem to like or dislike the arrows a lot. I think the problem is, like you said, that they resemble the enemies too much. I don't know how to change it right now, but i'll try to come up with something. :-)I totaly agree about the problem with enemy color being the same as the one for your ship. I'll probably try to change your color to blue, so it looks the same as the turrets you get in stage 2.It seems people enjoy playing the game over and over to get better upgrades, so i think i'll stay with the wrapping of the game, perhaps making the game increase in difficulty each run. What would you prefer, single play through or the possibility of playing through multiple/infinite times? :-)I was planning to either explain what picking the same upgrade multiple times does or removing the upgrade after being picked. I have yet to do either, and i see the problem. I think i'll add the description, and then i might remove the upgrade later, in case i get a lot of other upgrades :-)I can't do much about the problems with holding down keys as you leave the window, as i'm using awt and swing. In case you know of a solution, i'll be very happy to learn of it :-)

@irreversible_kev: Good to hear that you likethe vector graphics style. I like it alot aswell. I have however had comments about the mixing of styles being a problem, so i'd like to know what you feel about that aswell :-)

@kingaschi: Aight, i'll try to improve with the ships representation. I have a different model that looked horrible with the gun, but otherwise pretty cool. I might change to that and remove the gun from the ship. Thanks for commenting on it though :-)

@CommanderKeith: I tend to think that the keychoosing is only beneficial, as it displays the keys while letting you choose them. I always choose WASD for movement in a game like this, although i know my friend prefers ESDF. But on the other hand, the menu shouldn't be confusing, so if it was, let me know and i'll look into it :-)I'll look into increasing the bullet speed and decreasing delay between each bullet as you suggested. You are probably right :-)

Again, thanks a bunch for all the comments and suggestions. I've got a lot of things to work on now. :-)You all seem to like it alot, which makes it worth continuing to work on :-)

Great stuff! Looks nice, plays well. Felt a bit manic most of the time - left me feeling a bit out of control where I just ended up sitting still and taking damage so I could get shots in. Might also be worth making hit boxes bigger, feels a bit too accuracy oriented atm.

I can't do much about the problems with holding down keys as you leave the window, as i'm using awt and swing. In case you know of a solution, i'll be very happy to learn of it :-)

Clear the set of pressed keys when you lose focus. If the user deliberately holds down a key while changing focus away and back again then the game will erroneously consider it released, but I think that this is more acceptable than assuming that the key will not be released. A user will intuitively press a dropped key again, but it is less clear how to free a stuck key.

@Keyglass:Yeah, i hear what you're saying, i had two people testing the game irl yesterday, and they both said the same. I guess the intercepter enemies you encounter in the late half of stage one are a bit too fast this early in the game. Thanks for noticing, i'll try to look into it soon :-)

@Demonpants:I'm glad you like the game.The game does and did have sound. I have however had some great problems with my sound system (there a thread about this in the java sound forum). I may however have found a way to fix it now. So please check out the updated version and tell me if it works :-)

@Komadori:Yeah, i think you are right. I'll test it as soon as possible.I'll make JNLP's once i think the project is getting closer to being finished. Thanks for the suggestion though.

@All:Thanks for all the comments. Without them the game wouldn't be half the game it is :-)

I think having bullets the same colour/size as the stars in the background is a bad idea. Perhaps change the bullets fired to match the colour of the enemy shooting them? I didn't realise what the gun turret upgrade did for ages because I couldn't see the bullets.

Also, multiple upgrades don't really seem to have much affect. Or is it just me?

There is no end as it is right now and there is only a few stages...I am planning to throw in a lot of stages and some kind of ending. However it seems people like the ability to play through multiple times as it is now, keeping all their upgrades. So i think i'll leave it at that, perhaps increasing game speed each run-through...

You are right about the bullets, the gun turret's bullets are impossible to make out, and until i get a graphical representation of the turret itself, it can be hard to realize it is actually there...Same goes for the enemies bullets/stars/dust. I still want the shots to be easy to see, but i'll see what i can do

Upgrading the same thing have less and less effect. I did this to counter the otherwise overpowered effect you get from upgrading the same over and over.

@All:Also, as i've worked a lot with the sound system, and think i got it all working, i'd like to hear if you guys can get the sound working. (Remeber to select a sound mixer in the list during the Launcher screen).

@princec:Thanks a lot, glad you like it :-)Yeah, i've been considering a score system aswell. But i can't figure out how it should be done...Right now i'm thinking j*health + k/time, where j and k are constants bound to the stage perhaps...

I'm running a little dry og ideas for enemies and stages, so i'm very open to suggestions :-)

I'm still working on the game. I got alot of comments on the Vector style graphics on another forum, so i switched to raster style instead. I also added more enemies, stages and upgrades. The game should also work in fullscreen mode now.

@irreversible_kev:Yeah, i was a bit worried about the change in graphics aswell. But i think i got away with it aight aswell.I think i'll add some more enemies to boost that Left4Dead feeling :-)

@TheAnalogKid:Thanks alot. Anything in particular you like/dislike?

Updates:I did a lot of updates to the game. It now has 7 stages among others.I still have some problems with "Java Sound Audio Engine" and java sound. But hopefully i will get that worked out soon...The game also got released on javagametome.com, so hopefully that will be of some fun to people. :-)

I'm considering getting a sponsor for the game, but i have no experience with this, so i haven't had any luck finding any yet...If you have some good ideas, i'd be very interested :-)

Hey Scarzzurs, here are my comments:- playing in a window can be a problem because of the controls: since you must use the mouse to aim and shoot, sometimes the cursor go out of the window then you switch to another application. That can be a really frustrating experience.- again, controls. This is funny because I had so much troubles with that in Incredibuilder, BTW feel free to comment my game too. Steering the ship with the arrows isn't comfortable to me because of the lack of control. How about adopting the control scheme of asteriod? You steer with the mouse and shoot by holding the button. Or better: steer with the mouse with left click. Right click to shoot.

Hmmm. You can try playing the game with arrow keys and spacebar. It's a lot harder, and i don't think it adds anything to the gameplay.I realize that not all have a mouse at hand with all the laptops of today, but i really think this game benefits from mouse control.So long story short i think i've quite satisfied with the controls, even though i might consider your ideas for future games.

Yeah, i'm also quite happy to find other danish people out there doing the same as me. :-)There's a small community dedicated to the danish game scene at http://spiludvikling.dk. You might want to check that site out aswell...

@princec: I'm just a little worried that the number of jobs doesn't follow the number of people writing games :-)

@j_jerrik:Aight. :-)

@Renoria:Thanks. Yeah, i can't afford to pay an artist, so i have to make due with what i can cook up myself.I'm very glad you like it though. :-)If you find that not all the graphics are of the same quality i'd be happy to hear about it aswell.

I had an old friend of mine playtest some of my games. He noticed that my games aren't that rewarding. So i'm trying to add that to the game. First thing will be to add small floating text messages showing that you gain points when you kill something. My explosions in the game have become much better recently, but i think they need to look even better aswell.

Game is still in development, in fact i've made some major improvements recently.Game now features eight enemies, eight upgrades, eight stages and two powerups.Graphics have improved, performance have been optimized.The game now has a highscore list.

I added lives to the game, but as you are allowed to enter the highscore list, even if you don't make it through the game, i think i should perhaps remove lives again. I think i'd be better with no retries at all, or infinite retries and a dialog with two buttons and the text: "You have died.""Replay Stage / Submit Highscore"Any thoughts?

I did a bit of marketing and are now getting around 20 visitors a day to my website, so that's pretty good.I'm still interesting in getting a sponsor, but i'm guessing that is ridiculous unless i get atleast 100 visitors a day...

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